By AMY RILEY
One Citizen's Perspective

This past week the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that would eliminate the marriage tax penalty for married couples as of the 2001 filing year.

The measure, which will allow married couples to claim two times the individual standard deduction, seeks to eliminate the existing $1,400 discrepancy between single partners filing separate returns and married partners filing a joint return. The bill also promises to expand the bottom 15 percent tax bracket so that married couples filing jointly won't be penalized for pooling their incomes, which puts many married people into a higher tax bracket than if they were single and claiming a single income.

The legislation comes on the heels of the Congressional Budget Office report that the federal budget surplus is expected to grow “between $4.5 trillion and $5.7 trillion” over the next decade, $2.17 trillion of which is non-Social Security surplus revenue. Republicans and some Democrats have seen that, even allowing for aggressive national debt repayment, the federal government will be taking in way more than is needed to fund its own operation.

President Clinton promises to veto the bill, calling the surplus predictions speculative and Republicans irresponsible. Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) called the budget surplus projections the “fiscal equivalent of the dot com stock market.” Democrats fear that Republicans are spending money that is vital to paying down debt and saving Social Security and Medicare, and furthermore, spending a surplus which has not yet materialized. In classic spin mode, they accuse Republicans of “spending” money that is not theirs to spend.

What we have is the opposite of deficit spending — a federal government playing robber baron to millions of American citizens, taxing us to the hilt to create surplus revenue. Business as usual.

The only saving grace is that Clinton's veto will come in an election year, a reality which helped to lure some Democrats across the aisle to vote for the tax cut. The Democratic party leadership worries that the onus of a presidential veto will rest squarely with Democratic candidates in November.

When government coffers become bloated with our hard-earned dollars, and through executive veto, the best efforts of Congress to return that money to its rightful owners are thwarted, what we're really talking about is redistribution of wealth. It's quite painful enough, thank you, to pay what we do. To pay more than is necessary is theft.

The worst that could happen if this tax cut survived the presidential cleaver and the economy took a dive would be that the government might have to tighten their belt and reduce expenditures. That's a reality most Americans can relate to. If the government had less money to spend, they would be less equipped to manage the needs of the American people, and (gasp) the citizens might have to do more for themselves, and (double gasp) more to help each other.

And we wonder why America seems to have no heart. America has grown to rely on her government to solve every problem and fulfill every need, which was the plan all along of the socialist-leaning ruling elite.

I believe in compassionate conservatism. I believe that when there is suffering and there is no one else to help, America will take care of her own. One needs only to look at the outpouring of support for victims of natural disasters to know that when times are tough, we still have a heart for one another.

Our government's sense of entitlement to our money, and our people's sense of entitlement to a return on that “investment” is wrenching the ground from beneath us. We've gone from a laissez-faire economic philosophy, where we trusted ourselves with commerce, prosperity, and each other, to a lazy-fair system, where nobody trusts anybody.

Our system cannot survive by breaking the backs of the working people. In a lazy-fair system, producers eventually stop producing, and become all too satisfied to suckle the government teat with the rest of their fellow big government beneficiaries.

We don't need trillion dollar surpluses. We don't need to be micromanaged. We don't need to be subsidized, prioritized, supersized, or annuitized. We need to be free and self-sustaining. We need to make our own way and make our own communities. We need the responsibility of caring for those in need around us to put us back in touch with our own humanity.

There's not much left to give after the government taketh away, and not much motivation to become an asset with the government minding everyone's business.

[Your comments are welcome: ARileyFreePress@aol.com]

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page